


Romeo's A Girl

by oonaseckar



Category: Dollhouse, Smallville
Genre: F/M, Hive Mind, Implied/Referenced Mind Control, Mind Control, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Mind Manipulation, Mind Rape, Partial Mind Control, Past Mind Control
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2021-01-13 03:27:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21237389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oonaseckar/pseuds/oonaseckar
Summary: Smallville/Dollhouse crossover. Smallville: from end of Season 8, no Zod, bad naughty Tess, no Lutessa.  Dollhouse: Season 1, pre-Bennett.





	Romeo's A Girl

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter title is a quote from Evita Ochel.

_O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven,_  
Keep me in temper: I would not be mad.  
**'King Lear', Act I Scene V, William Shakespeare.**

She didn’t know what to do. She was frantic all the time with an unexplained urgency, an indefinable need, like horrible pain or insane itching. But it was neither of these things nor anything else she could identify, and she couldn’t take an antihistamine or analgesic and fix it. Or scratch till she bled, or kill herself.

They told her it was grief, which seemed ridiculous. Lois sat her down again and again, stopping her frantic pacing, cleaning, midnight walking, making her drink tea and sit at the kitchen table. This was apparently supposed to make her feel better.

Her husband was dead. So was Davis. She was only supposed to be grieving for one of them, and had to remember the fact when anyone was around. It’s hard to remember anything when your brain is either stopped like a clock or screeching like someone’s left a spoon in the dish and turned the microwave on. Just waiting for the door to blow.

Her doctor dosed her up and it didn’t do a damned thing. Pills weren’t going to bring anyone she loved back. They weren’t going to change hard facts, like partial responsibility for Jimmy’s absence and the hole he’d left in his family’s life, as well as hers. Like Davis being willing to kill her for an error of judgment, a selfish leap for safety, when she would have sworn her life away that she knew him better than that.

She didn’t suddenly see a saintly Jimmy without flaws and weaknesses, didn’t try to reinstate a romantic devotion that hadn’t existed in the first place. She didn’t forgive Davis for being willing to crush her skull, even after a lifetime starved for love, in however much pain. These facts didn’t help. Jimmy had been her friend, as well as an asshole sometimes. Davis she’d loved, saved, trusted too much, given too little. Their fallibility did nothing to diminish the pain.

At least she didn’t have to deal with Clark. The relief when he left was so great, it was worth any rubbish she’d had to spout to satisfy him she was in no need of re-education, to get him out the door and out of Smallville. He needed to be right, to know that his version of events was the official one. So much so, he fed her provocative counter-assertions, to get the exculpation he needed to hear, without being responsible for it. Fortunately he couldn’t prevent her mental revision of his version as he continued to spout. Just as long as it was never verbalized and he was never openly crossed.

Because they all said it would get better, she waited. Putting a deadline on it she thought reasonable, she saw the date come and go. After four deadlines had passed and she still woke up, wishing anyone who wasn't Jimmy or Davis dead for daring to be alive, she knew she was going crazy. Properly, truly crazy, the kind that would land her with the same fate as her mother. Obsessional routines that promised safety were taking over her life. It was all she could do not to scream at or hit anyone who stepped in the way when she waited in a line. Pleasure was dead: in fact she was so utterly anhedonic she was barely distinguishable from a corpse. She thought herself about on the verge of visual and auditory hallucination: then that line was crossed, and she drew a fresh line in the sand.

It was a long way past the time for measured, careful, moderate treatments. She retrieved the file on her laptop that wasn't marked as secret or remarkable in any way, and dialed a number from it.

********************

'So, Miss... Sullivan. So nice to meet you. I'm just wondering, what can we do for you?'

She sat across from the woman with the power to switch off her pain, wondered why the fate of so many always rested in the hands of the deluded and the affected. Maybe only they would want such power.

'I arranged a meeting with your assistant.' So dry and cold, her voice, like someone very old, or very very tired.

'You did indeed.' Adele DeWitt consulted papers on her desk. 'In which you made it utterly, utterly clear that you know... let's see... well, rather a lot more than we thought anyone could possibly know about our organisation. Rather more, in fact,' she said, looking up, a threat so mild as to be almost missable in her green eyes, 'than we care for anyone to know. So I ask you again, Miss Sullivan... what can we do for you?'

Chloe felt the dryness of her own smile. 'First, you can disabuse yourself of any notion of the utility of threats, violence, blackmail... any of that. To begin with, I have some useful friends. You may have heard of Oliver Queen. Also Lex Luthor. If I should come to any unfortunate end and certain things are not done – randomly generated things not accessible via duress – and some preconditions not fulfilled, they'll acquire knowledge that would be inconvenient to you.'

'Queen. Yes. We're quite familiar with him.' Not especially surprising, that. Oh, _Oliver_. 'But when you mention Mr Luthor... I rather understand him to be someone likely to rejoice at any mishap you might encounter, rather than otherwise. Or am I wrong?' Adele DeWitt clearly wasn't used to being wrong.

Chloe nodded. 'Oh, Lex can't abide me: much like many siblings and former friends. But if I'm to get my comeuppance, it's highly likely he might take personal offence should it be at any hands but his. We were close, once, and the memory lingers. I don't like to think what he might do if anyone _else_ harmed me.'

They stared at each other a moment, game on, assessing their hands. Miss DeWitt nodded. 'Very well. I understand your point. But I repeat myself for a third time: Miss Sullivan, what can we do for you?'

Chloe crossed her legs, leant forward a little, spoke with utter sincerity. 'Miss DeWitt, make me a doll.'

******************

They had been arguing for an hour now. You might call it discussion, debate: but there was an irritability, an incomprehension in the older woman's responses that gave them an edge. She had been assessed, rejected as weak: Adele had no patience with her.

'Your chosen course of action is quite unnecessarily drastic. And, if you'll forgive me, dramatic. There are many routes to navigate and survive pain and heartbreak.'

'You seem a little bit moralistic,' Chloe responded, a touch snappy. Her patience was shot lately, along with everything else. 'Aren't you supposed to be the sinister Fagin luring me in, not piously urging me to a life of honest rectitude and virtuous endeavour?'

Adele smiled patronisingly. 'Miss Sullivan, not just _anyone _can be a doll. And it may surprise you to know that you're not the first person to actively seek it out.'

'Not just anyone... So you have an admissions process?' Chloe eyed her sceptically. 'My SATs were off the chart. Does that help any? You've taken drug addicts, criminals and psychopaths: what exactly do I have to do to get arrested and mindwiped around here? Does watching the two halves of my heart slaughter each other and die not qualify me? You're very quick to judge: wait till it happens to you, then get back to me about it. Seriously, what does it take?''

They paused at the balcony and stared down at the milling throng of beautiful bodies and mindless faces. Adele turned and smiled at her. 'Perhaps you need to need us? Miss Sullivan, you've been very polite: but everything in your face and voice tells me what you think of this set-up. You think us amoral, corrupted, corrupting. But you're not looking deeply enough. You seek us out because it serves your purpose: but many other means could do so. You want what we can offer: but you don't _need_ it. You have innumerable options, family and friends, resources, a brilliant mind. Every one of those lost children down there: they need the shelter we can give.'

Chloe had barely a suggestible bone in her body: but she could see that Adele DeWitt at least wanted to believe what she was saying. It made the protection of half-truths harder to maintain, if she was to achieve her objective.

Unwillingly she conceded a little truth. 'I'm not just here because my heart is broken, Miss DeWitt. That I could – or would have to – live with. There's something else. I have a familial history of – mental instability. My heart hurts: but a broken mind is something I might never come back from.'

Adele nodded, hands drawn behind her back, a more sympathetic look on her face. 'Let's walk together, Miss Sullivan.' They weaved down riserless steps, around dolls and handlers with preoccupied faces, assignments imminent or underway. Past haphazard groups of off-duty operatives, blank smiles not chilling Chloe in the least as they might have once. She wanted that expression, that exact smile, plastered on her own face. That invulnerable, inviolate indifference.

Dewitt stopped at a water fountain, offered her a crystal glass. 'Of course, when you contacted us, we investigated a little way into your history. May I express my regrets for your mother's sad experiences. They were related, I believe, to the Smallville meteor phenomenon?'

Chloe drank greedily. The doctor's pills dehydrated her severely, with no apparent beneficial effects in recompense whatsoever. 'Partly, quite probably. That might have sparked it off. But the family history goes back further than that, further than I knew myself until I started investigating. Great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents have died in asylums. Adolescents in my family tree have taken the usual adolescent route out of their troubles. First and second cousins with money or health troubles, dead under train tracks or at the end of a rope... You have a general idea, I'm sure.'

'Of course, if you look deep enough, far back enough in any genealogical record, all families have some psychological problems,' Adele suggested.

'Of course. But the strain is more virulent and prevalent in my own than I like. There are some amazing individuals in there: inventors, engineers, writers, painters, poets. A number of unarguable geniuses. And at the other end of the spectrum, insanity and criminality and perversion, many many incidences. Miss DeWitt, I don't intend to be a casualty of my genetic tendencies. I'm not functional right now, I'm effectively broken: but my life is waiting for me.'

Adele turned and leaned against the fountain, girlish and womanly, mother, mistress. 'I can understand your fears. May I call you Chloe? I feel I know you better now: I understand better. But Chloe, a statistical risk, however real, isn't the same thing as an imminent threat.' She raised an eyebrow, let the challenge hang in the air.

Their eyes met like a stream flowing between them, thought and information, back and forth. This woman knew, full well, but would accept nothing implicitly. Everything had to be stated outright: she covered her ass well. 'I'm experiencing symptoms,' Chloe conceded flatly. 'More than just bereavement, grief, depression. Let us just say, if I went into too much detail with my doctor, I'd be in Belle Reve already.'

Adele didn't let her off the hook, only raised an eyebrow. Chloe folded.

'I'm getting the full spectrum and it's getting worse. Hallucinatory, obsessional, delusional, compulsive, time compression and elongation, blank periods and blackouts, loss of logic and continuity in conversation... it's periodic at present, and fleeting. I've been able to cover up. But it's only deteriorating. I can read AMA lists of symptoms, understand a peer-reviewed journal article. I'm a layperson but sufficiently educated to recognise an imminent psychotic break. That's the kind of episode that can do damage you don't come back from. Conventional treatments – the ones my friends and family would urge me to - will only contain, ameliorate at best, and won't prevent episodic recurrence. The stats are not good: given my family history, for me they're worse. In familial terms, the historic pattern is a rapid spiral down from the first incident. Few recoveries.'

Her breath was gone. It was out, now, mostly. Let the woman take it or leave it.

Adele took her arm. 'We must discuss it further. But first, come and meet Mr Brink, our chief technician. A delightful young man.'

*************

That was the unspoken agreement. Beyond that were the formalities, and they took up an intolerable period. Meetings, scans, medical histories, contracts and revised contracts and reviews of her psychological competence to consent. Detailed explanation of the process, the agreement, the conditions of her servitude and her release. Many warnings of the seriousness of the step she was taking, of exactly what she was agreeing to in explicit and unattractive terminology. Finally, days later, she was back in Adele's office, drinking excellent coffee, utterly fatigued, hanging on through sheer determination.

'So.' Adele rested hands on her elegantly crossed legs, examined Chloe with alert approval. 'You have two hours left to change your mind.'

Chloe's head sank back. She knocked back the last of her coffee. 'Do you want me to?'

Adele shook her head. 'I only want you to know that the option is still available: right up until the last minute. Your signature means nothing: it's explicitly stated in the terms of the contract that it only comes into effect on completion of your first scan and treatment.'

Chloe thought about that for a moment, and shook her head. 'My mind is made up.'

'Well,' Adele said briskly, 'I confidently expect you to be a marvellous asset to Rossum. And after five years of analgesia and forgetfulness, you'll have your original personality restored, as well as being a relatively wealthy and still young woman. Perhaps you're not as foolish as I thought you when you first arrived in my office.'

'Not quite my old personality,' Chloe reminded her.

'Oh, in all essential respects I think it's fair to say so,' Adele countered. 'Of course, we'll add the pre-agreed tweaks regarding your mental stability, and bump your emotional set-point down a notch or two to enhance your general tranquility. No point setting you free out into the world in the same condition as you arrived here. But in essence, the things that make you Chloe Sullivan will remain unchanged.

She was still. Pain that was like a hated friend tugged at her, and she tried to shut her mind to memory. 'We all get changed. One way or another. I just want to control those changes – a little. Finally.'

'Of course,' Adele agreed smoothly. 'Your requests will be carried out to the letter. We're expecting great things from your contribution: you're certainly owed the fullest recompense at its end. There's some excitement already about the new Romeo in the Dollhouse.'

Here finally, something that hadn't been discussed. 'Romeo. That'll be my active codename?' She tried it out in her mind, on her tongue. Not that it mattered. 'Shouldn't I be a guy for that?'

'Previous Romeos have been,' Adele agreed. 'But change is delightful. A female Romeo will be so refreshing. Bear in mind the common habit of playing against gender within Shakespeare's plays. At my all-girl private school, a female Romeo in productions was very much the rule. Although the one time we poached a male housemaster from the local boys' dayschool, it caused positively Titanic excitement.'

Chloe carefully eyed the woman up and down, and wondered if Adele DeWitt deliberately spoofed and satirized her own persona to see if any American could identify and call her on it. Good on her if so: it had actually afforded Chloe a moment of amusement, if only that. Jolly hockeysticks, and how.

'I think I'll go and bathe, if that's okay,' she said. 'Get myself relaxed ready for the procedure.'

Adele leaned forward. 'Don't go quite yet.' There was a note of sincerity in her voice. Though if anyone could fake that, then... 'I know that your determination to go forward with your plan means that your feelings remain unchanged. As well as from your multiple interviews and assessments. But, Chloe, I do still feel a measure of concern. While you are a member of the Dollhouse, the utmost care will be taken of you. You will be delivered up to your life in five years time in the peak of physical and mental health. But emotional health is another thing: and much more delicate than our tools can fully deal with, subject to philosophy and ratiocinative processes as much as to biochemical ones. You've chosen to retain all your memories of the two men you've lost, even once you're no longer an inmate. Is that really wise?'

Chloe examined her hands. She felt surges of pain like an actual physical wound. 'I want... the sting taken out of the memories. You can do that for me. You can do that?' She knew the answer, but still lifted her head questingly for confirmation.

Adele nodded. 'We can. We will. We can ward off your inbuilt predisposition to psychosis, rebuild you stronger. We can take the pain, the... burn.... out of your recollections. But is that what you want?'

Chloe blinked back water. She'd held on this far. She could hold on a little longer. 'I don't want to forget. I want to go back to my old life, my old friends. To be able to reminisce, to talk about them... I just, yes, I want the burn out of it. Because it's burning me down right now. Soon there'll only be ashes left. I want to be a doll. Then I want you to fix me.'

Adele's hand came over hers, as she rounded the desk. 'My dear. We will. We'll fix you.'

*************

The little blonde woman lay on the treatment table, her nudity pointlessly covered for modesty's sake by the bonds that held her there, unconscious. The prudishness combined with prurience of Rossum made Topher laugh, or it used to.

He knew this one, had been present at meetings, met her himself in her full outer-worldly form. Even subject to mental deterioration and in the midst of desperate measures, she had been quite a presence. Her intellectual powers were formidable, and her physical charms considerable. It had been enough for him to slightly regret not taking up that fellowship at Metropolis U when he could have done, having had considerably more dazzling offers. Might have been worth it...

Still. That was an irrelevance now. With the mindwipe only waiting on Adele's presence, he wouldn't be having any stimulating discussions with Chloe Sullivan about neuroscience and the feminine advantage in gaming any time soon.

Adele was late. Of course: Adele was always late, for him at least. She insisted on being present for the induction of this very special new doll, she was bringing the newbie hotshot handler from the Japanese branch who was the _only_ guy they were going to entrust her to, she gave him all kinds of shit about how delicate this operation was and all the fancy friends Miss Sullivan had and the bottomless pit of lava they'd all be in if anything went wrong... and she was late. And now _here _she was, atypically breathless and hurried, rushing through the door. Hair slightly disordered. Handlerless.

Her rage poured through the lab like lava itself. A botched job, an assassinated handler, an impersonation and a narrow escape from asphyxiation by a malevolently turned active... Oh dear God, the fun at Rossum never started. Especially since... 'Alpha?'

Adele turned to vent at him, since he was handy. 'Of course it was Alpha, you utter ratwit! When is it ever anyone else! Can someone please explain to me why it is that we have still to put that mad dog down and release ourselves from perpetual psychological strain and the threat of imminent death?'

He was the only other member of staff there, so she was probably addressing him. It was unlikely Miss Sullivan would be able to help her. He judged that distraction might be the safest tactic. 'Are we doubling up with another active's handler, or delaying the wipe until you identify a suitable replacement?'

It at least warded off the savage ferocity of the beast. He could see her stop and think about it. Her mouth straightened into a decisive line. 'Neither.'

Oh, what a woman, what a piece of work, what a... 'And in that case, your plan is...?'

'Mr Brink, you have a new job description. A new and expanded job description. Congratulations. You're Romeo's new handler.'

****

Protest availed him nothing. 'But I've got no relevant experience or training!'

'Oh,' she said, waving his objection away, 'we can fix you up with all of that. Martial arts, firearms, intensive one-on-one training, you'll be a ninja before you know it. Don't worry, my fair-headed boy.'

'I'm a nerd with a neuroscience Phd and a Caltech education. I can't catch a ball. The only sports I'm involved in require a Wii. I hyperventilate if required to engage in too much direct eye contact. And I already happen to be holding down a full-time job, in case you hadn't noticed, as the head technician in this Rossum base! For god's sake, there have to be more appropriate candidates-'

She interrupted him, brusque, casual, uninterested. 'We can make of you what we will. By any means necessary, let me remind you... Ivy can take over many of your mundane duties on the technical side, though you will maintain overall authority. There is no problem. This is happening. In any case, stop whining. You're a big strong _lad_.'

'A big strong lad with _dyspraxia_,' he muttered, turning away. 'And a severe anxiety-related aversion to firearms. And cowardice.'

This time was the last time she'd feel this pain (such pain). She lay quietly, and willed for Jimmy's easy smiling face to be the last thing she remembered. Of course the willing was what made it impossible, and even here and even now his face intruded. (Just like always, at the _worst possible_ moment, with Jimmy.)

But this was the last time.

*************

Twenty minutes later Topher removed the restraints, and Adele bent over the blond girl, an unaccustomedly gentle expression on her face. She beckoned him, and he said what must be said. He asked her to trust him, and she promised him her life. He'd never really thought about this experience from the handler's point of view. He'd never written the lines, only conditioned the responses. Her eyes were so alive as they locked onto him. Could an active feel with such ferocity, such raw verve? Her eyes were lime fruit on fire and feet in an intolerably cold stream, fishes brushing past, all the sensation and volume and ferocity he'd spent twenty-six years living solely in his brain avoiding, shutting out with quiet determination.

He was in trouble. He was falling.

******************

Davis Bloome woke up in a comfortable bed, bandaged only lightly, curtains fully open, no whispers in the back of his head for the first time in how long? It wasn't quite like the last time. But it was the same room.


End file.
